Playroom

☆♡☆ Playroom☆♡☆

Words by Samuel Nugent

Donald Winnicott once wrote a short analysis of what he believed a child may say to their mother as they transition from an infant to a child.

‘I Find You,

You Survive What I Do To You,

As I Come To Recognise You As Not Me,

I Forget You,

But You Remember Me,

I Lose You,

I’m Sad.’

If only I could tell the child don’t worry you’ll be able to find her and your childhood again.

In writing ‘Playroom’ I don’t only want to find it but I want to reclaim it.

See, I’m a Storyteller, a lover of fantasy, of play, of moments enchanting, embarrassing, exciting, devastating and awkward.

I tell these stories because I can’t let them pass me by.

I hold these stories close to me like a doll, for me, and those like me who grew up Queer.

This is for them, for me and for Martin Waddell’s Owl Babies.

Children play with dolls with many different purposes and motives.

They make stories up with the dolls that shift the way they look and feel about not only the dolls but themselves.

‘Dramatic play’ simply means that children envision these dolls with different roles; a doll can be a teacher, a partner, a friend as well as perhaps most importantly themselves.

In the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, the protagonist’s love interest Clementine, played by Kate Winslet, asks if she is ugly, whilst the protagonist Joel (Jim Carrey), answers with a swift no. She talks about her doll ‘Clementine’. This doll she recalls as her ugly doll, often as a kid she would yell at the doll ‘you can't be ugly, be pretty!”She later says that she believes.. it's weird... like if I can transform her (she’d) magically change too.’ I made my Sam doll the other day, yes it is ugly, but I want to treat it with kindness.

As we grow up we are told to let go of these childish things, separate ourselves from the fantasies we had as children about what we can be and instead get used to the way the world sees us.

To be Queer is to know that the way the world sometimes sees us is different than who we are.

To be Queer is to be multiple people at once.

To grow up Queer is to know that these people are capable of changing, of shifting, of breaking, of collapsing, of mending, of bending, of shapeshifting.

☆♡☆CANINES AND CASTLES - IVAN JELDRES ☆♡☆

Ivan and I both like canines.

Growing up as a little “boy”, I carried dog breed books around with me at all times, amazed at the many different ways a dog can be a dog.

As a non-binary person I now think about the different ways I can be Sam.

I can be a wolf made out of cardboard, a small dog made out of wood as well as a fierce dragon.

In the 1959 Disney animated ‘Sleeping Beauty’, Maleficent is presented as a glamorous witch dressed to the nines in a large cape, adorned with spiralled horns and an intimidating presence. Originally banished from the otherwise pastel fairy kingdom for being different, Maleficent is annoyed at how she is excluded from the world around her. The people judging her for retaliating I don't believe have ever gone through the experience of not being invited to the party to ‘feel quite distressed (in) not receiving an invitation’, to be left out, to be Queer.

Ivan, likewise hated the way that Maleficent was treated in ‘Sleeping Beauty’. In place of this hatred Ivan makes a safer space for the dragon version of Maleficent to live and survive in ‘Where Did All The Dragons Go?’2023, through this we make castles for the versions of ourselves that originally had none.

☆♡☆WHERE WE LOVED FLEETINGLY WITHOUT KNOWING - ZETH CAMERON ☆♡☆

Zeth Cameron, like me, is interested in carabiners,keys and charms.

In Bob Damron’s 1980 Address Book, codes were developed in which to wear your keys in certain ways was to propose the ways that you are inclined intimately, to be dominant is to wear your keys on the left and to be submissive is to wear your keys on the right.

My carabiner has my home-keys attached and I often switch the orientation of the way it is positioned, as depending on the situation I can be both submissive and dominant.

When I was growing up however I was very submissive with my crushes.

As a child I would wrestle with other boys.

It was exciting!

The tangled mess of sweaty flesh in a pillowed room.

D was my favourite to wrestle with.

I would routinely wrestle with him and let him win every time. After he would hug me and give me water, play with my hair.

One day at D’s house, I was getting changed when he accidentally walked in on me.

“Wow” he exclaimed at the sight of my penis. I was worried when he did this as I thought maybe it was providing a sign that I ‘liked’ wrestling so much that day. Nonchalantly, I asked what’s up. He laughed and said “I can’t believe how small your penis is”. Of course being 10, I had no idea how to respond, so I said “really?I never knew that it was so small. In retaliation D shows me his penis and then gets his older brother to show us his.

Zeth’s ‘ installation wrestles between these fleshy moments. The push and pull, the way that bodies levitate and fall. The specialness of these moments is grabbed in the small adornments that Cameron collects and attaches lovingly. Zeth in doing so catches the uncatchable, the moments of our youth where we loved fleetingly without knowing.

☆♡☆SWEETNESS- JUN QIAO ☆♡☆

As a kid I used to attach small glo-in-the dark planets to the ceiling of my bunk bed. I’d watch them glow for me and fantasise about levitating.

I loved the way the planets become a mobile solar system above my head and placed them in dancing formations. Whilst the stickers were directly above my head they seemed aeons away. There was a delicacy in their considered placement, and their ability to produce light. Jun Qiao’s ‘Sweetness 2.0’, likewise, makes me feel like a child experiencing something undefinable, in wondrous brilliant colours of blue, purple and red the works spin in the air making me beam more and more.

Jun delicately folds components of their work in the way one would twirl a ribbon. This twirling notion is repeated through the delicate spin of their mobile.

Whilst spinning it bounces off the same light as my special planets and stars. .

It reminded me of a moment when I was 8 years old laying on the trampoline with my sister in summer looking at the stars, how she grabbed my hand, twirled her middle finger around my palm and explained that the delicate spin of her finger meant that she “loved me as much as the planets do”.

Sweetness

☆♡☆CHRISTMAS IS MY FAVOURITE HOLIDAY- ALFIE BARKER ☆♡☆

Writing about his work ‘Hot Wheels’, 2023 Alfie Barker puts into words a feeling I know well: “The crippling anxiety of opening surprise presents and not being able to prepare a reaction”.

As a child I would often say the wrong thing. One year D bought me a Hermonie-doll that my parents had also given me. I didn't know that at the time to loudly exclaim “Now I’ve Got Two!” was rude.

Another time, my mum bought me a more masculine scented perfume than my usual more floral scent and I felt very rude when I had to ask her if we could return it.

After that my mum would get me to write out a list of presents I’d like to receive.

On this list I'd write things I knew I wasn’t going to get. These things included a dog, a trip to Italy, and other luxury items that were out of my parent’s price range.

The desire for things to stay desired.

I now think long and hard about what present I’ll give to friends and family and in turn get upset when the gift I give doesnt get the reaction I was hoping for.

☆♡☆THE OVERWHELMING COMFORT OF THE DASHBOARD- XANTHE DOBBIE☆♡☆

Xanthe Dobbie’s website’s page on their artwork ‘Queer Apocalypse’, (2021) starts with the italicised gothic statement ‘The Apocalypse Is Queer’.

Whilst the apocalypse is Queer, so is the past. For me it started on tumblr with images positioned blogged aside one another, a cute dog, next to a bloody sword, a poem of Sylvia Plath’s parallel to a picture of Lana Del Rey, alongside lots and lots of Queer porn and art. It seems that after lengthy periods of isolation we have the proclivity to return to the formative stage of our lives in which we were on Tumblr.

Growing up Queer, Tumblr was a “safe” space for me. I’d unwind through looking over these images. During this time I’d often hide away in my room, spending countless hours curating my internet presence. This presence took over the majority of what I believed my shape was at the time. To return to these things now is to be capable of recapturing something we have thought we had lost, and to understand that whilst our shapes change our interest in images and objects may never falter.

Xanthe and I are collectors of objects. The objects I have around me form a still-life of both my past, present and hopefully future self. My copy of Owl Babies, sits alongside a teddy-bear pouch holding my tobacco, a script from my doctor, alongside my dildo.